2017-03-09

Caesar! Bunnies! Poetry! Gaiman!

I first read Shakespeare my sophomore year of high school. Mrs Errecart said we were reading Julius Caesar and I was, I'll admit, pretty scared. Shakespeare??? It was going to be hard and boring and miserable.

Only it was not. I loved Julius Caesar. When I graduated high school, my parents got me Oxford's complete Shakespeare and he's been a big part of my life ever since.

But I've never again read Julius Caesar---which strikes me as rather remarkable, given how much Shakespeare I was assigned in college, not to mention the occasional for-fun reads.

But given the current climate, I thought this play might be a good choice. My AP kids are reading it next week and I just finished my first-ever reread in preparation.

And holy cow, guys. It's really good. So much fun to read. It's fast-paced and full of great dialogue. No fat on this baby.

So let's start by noting that Gary's professional life is dedicated to bringing out the voluminous, unpublished treasures Margarite Wise Brown left behind. This doesn't excuse that the purple-prosed hagiographic tendencies of this biography, but it does explain them somewhat. It's also worth complaining about that the biography tells a lot about what was flitting through its characters mind at any given moment, but the notes don't clearly back up that level of detail. The other thing that drove me nuts was how Gary would set up a storyline as important, then completely forget it. See her parents, for example, but the most egregious example, I felt, was her relationship with illustrator Phyra Slobodkina. They were working together at Margaret's Maine home when she parroted the anti-Semitic language heard from her America First Committee friends (and broadcasts). Phyra, being Jewish, was offended and left the next morning. Margaret felt awful and planned to make an apology. Did she? Dunno. In the remaining 140 pages Phyra's mentioned only twice in passing and there's nothing about the whole anti-Semite thing. That sort of thing is the book's biggest flaw.

But flaws aside, I really enjoyed this book. I didn't know much about Margaret Wise Brown coming in except she had written a whole lotta books. In fact, the only reason I checked this book out is because I had to talk to a librarian for checkout, was embarrassed by what I was getting, and had grabbed the closest respectable-looking thing off the NEW shelves as balance.

Even with the salt poisoning, I'm now convinced she was a genius. And not in the mystical sense, but in the sense of she had an unusual ability and spent her life working to refine it. Learning about how she got into the trade and the amount of time she spent with kids finetuning her stories was inspiring.

And her stupid, stupid death at the hand of a French doctor was shocking, even though I knew she was doomed to die young. She seemed to be on the cusp of her first healthy romantic relationship and then she was dead.

There are other biographies about her which I'll probably never read, but I now add her to the list of writers I admire. And the list of writers who were taken from us much too soon. I have to admit to a great, never-to-be-consummated desire to know what she would have done next.

(In closing, here's a you-never-know for you. During probate following her death, the estimated future worth of Goodnight Moon was estimated at $200.)

I really liked this collection. Even though some of the poems were dumb and some pushed a simple concept too far, I liked how adventurous it was and how it bounded about, sticking its nose in unexpected places and turning up all sorts of weird things, some of which even managed to be beautiful.

Gaiman's an interesting fellow. I stopped reading his novels for adults (not in an I've-sworn-them-off sense) because they just don't work as well as his shorter works---comics, short stories, novels for kids. And although I wouldn't call this new collection a 100%er, it's mostly good and mostly very good when it's good.

Gaiman's at his best when he's mining old myths and tales and melting them to ore to pour into new moulds. And there are some lovely examples of this here. (But also some examples where it almost seems like a Gaiman imitator taking his schtick too far. So it goes.)

I started this in the audio version. I enjoy listening to Gaiman, I suppose. He reads well. Though I'm not sure that his is always the best voice for a particular story. But hey: he's a rock star. No way around that. Give the fans what they want.